As presented in July 2008, SportsML, developed under the auspices of the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), is an open, global XML standard for the interchange of sports data. Designed to be as easy to understand and implement as possible, SportsML allows for the exchange of sports scores, schedules, standings, and statistics for a wide variety of competitions. Its extensibility allows for the easy accommodation of many sports from around the globe. SportsML cooperates with current IPTC standards NewsML and NITF to enable publishers to package sports statistics alongside edited coverage of sports.

SportsML uses the Extensible Markup Language (XML) to define the content and structure of sports data, which means that developers of interactive or printed sports data services will have a far easier time integrating sports feeds that adhere to SportsML than if they rely on other proprietary formats.

SportsML consists of a core DTD that contains a great amount of properties that describe a wide range of sports coverage. Much useful sports reporting can be done through the core DTD. XML vocabularies can also be specified by W3C XML Schema. In addition, SportsML contains several 'plug-in' specific-sport DTDs, which are only necessary when the publisher needs to go in-depth for a specific sport. The fact that there are only seven sports covered in SportsML's initial release does not limit SportsML to these seven sports. The core DTD provides an excellent starting point for many sports, and the development process for other plug-ins will continue. Interested users are more than welcome to take part in SportsML's expansion and growth.

Standings: Who's in first place? Who's closest to qualifying for the championship?

Statistics: How do the players and/or teams measure up against one another in various categories?

News: How do we combine editorial coverage of sports with all these data feeds? How do we package metadata- and multimedia-filled articles together with sports data?

Global in scope and design

Common framework for all sports

Plug-in modules for specific sports

Well documented and easy to use

Open and non-proprietary

SportsML description 2003: "SportsML aims to be the global XML standard for the interchange of sports data. Designed to be as easy to understand and implement as possible, SportsML allows for the exchange of sports scores, schedules, standings, and statistics for a wide variety of competitions. Its extensibility allows for the easy accommodation of many sports from around the globe. SportsML cooperates with current IPTC standards NewsML and NITF to enable publishers to package sports statistics alongside edited coverage of sports. SportsML uses the eXtensible Markup Language to define the content and structure of sports data, which means that developers of interactive or printed sports data services will have a far easier time integrating sports feeds that adhere to SportsML than if they rely on other proprietary formats."

[June 15, 2003] On May 15, 2003 the International Press Telecommunications Council announced the final approval of SportsML Version 1.0. The main distribution is the SportsML Version 1.0 Documentation. XML DTDs are provided for Core, American Football, Baseball, Basketball, Golf, Ice Hockey, Soccer, and Tennis. "Within each XML DTD, and for each element, the following documentation is provided: (1) Short description for the element; (2) Longer description for the element; (3) Description for each attribute. Additionally, attributes values are often maintained in external controlled vocabularies." IPTC's goal is to develop SportsML as "the global XML standard for the interchange of sports data. Designed to be as easy to understand and implement as possible, SportsML allows for the exchange of sports scores, schedules, standings, and statistics for a wide variety of competitions. Its extensibility allows for the easy accommodation of many sports from around the globe. SportsML cooperates with current IPTC standards NewsML and NITF to enable publishers to package sports statistics alongside edited coverage of sports."

[April 02, 2002]AP MegaSports in XML Uses Sports Markup Language. A joint announcement from ScreamingMedia Inc. and AP Digital describes a plan for adoption and implementation of the XML-based SportsML format for Internet and wireless distribution of AP MegaSports news feeds using ScreamingMedia's conversion technology. AP MegaSports in XML "will be delivered to Web environments, wireless applications and other interactive platforms, to provide customers with significantly faster implementation, better customization capabilities, and enhanced functionality. SportsML uses the Extensible Markup Language (XML), to create flexible packaging of sports content. Features of AP MegaSports that SportsML will facilitate integration of include sport-specific scrolling headlines, linked content, in-progress updates, play-by-play, and more. The service will be rolled out over the next three months and will include headlines, stories, scores, stats, sounds and photos from all major U.S. and many world professional sports leagues, as well as top amateur and collegiate competitions. The AP MegaSports package provides sites and services with stories, scores, stats, sounds and photos 24 hours a day." Developed by the International Press Telecommunications Council, SportsML is "an emerging open global standard for the interchange of sports data; markup languages applied to news feeds allow for easy packaging of text stories, audio, video, photos and other multimedia content." [Full context]

[November 09, 2001]Draft XML DTDs for Sports Markup Language (SportsML). A communiqué from Alan Karben (Chairman, IPTC SportsML Effort) reports on the release of version 0.5 draft DTDs for the IPTC's Sports Markup Language (SportsML). The IPTC's design goal is to create a "cross-sport, cross-language XML standard for the interchange of sports data and statistics. SportsML supports the identification and description of several sports characteristics, including: (1) Scores: Who's winning, and how did the score change? (2) Schedules: Who's playing who, when, and where? (3) Standings: Who's in first place? Who's closest to qualifying for the championship? (4) Statistics: How do the players and/or teams measure up against one another in various categories? (5) News: How do we combine editorial coverage of sports with all these data feeds,and package metadata- and multimedia-filled articles together with sports data?" In addition to the 'sportsml-core.dtd', files containing the XML DTDs have names like 'specific-american-football.dtd', 'specific-baseball.dtd', 'specific-basketball.dtd', 'specific-golf.dtd', 'specific-ice-hockey.dtd', 'specific-soccer.dtd', and 'specific-tennis.dtd'. The DTDs, documentation, and sample documents are available for download. [Full context]

SportsML example XML instances. The sample SportsML files presented here are viewable in XML; additionally, each has each been transformed by an XSLT style sheet which transforms the SportsML into HTML, making its content look (more or less) like one sees on the web or in print.

[July 11, 2008] SportsML 2.0 Approved for Use in IPTC's New G2 Family of Standards." By Alan Karben. IPTC Announcement. The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) is developing a new "G2" generation of news exchange format standards, using state-of-the-art Metadata and XML technology to combine rich functionality, easy of use, compactness and compatibility with the Semantic Web. ITPC's SportsML Chairman and Editor recently announced the approval of SportsML Version 2.0 by IPTC at the Annual General Meeting 2008 in Glasgow. With this approval, SportsML can act "in a 'stand-alone mode', or can also be carried properly as a package using the IPTC's new G2 family of standards. Other core and sport-specific improvements are in this release as well." SportsML is an open, global XML standard for the interchange of sports data -- sports scores, schedules, standings, and statistics for a wide variety of competitions. Its extensibility allows for the easy accommodation of many sports from around the globe. SportsML cooperates with current IPTC standards NewsML and NITF to enable publishers to package sports statistics alongside edited coverage of sports. As of SportsML Version 2.0, independent DTDs and XML schemas were provided for American Football; Baseball; Basketball; Curling; Golf; Ice Hockey; Motor Racing; Rugby; Soccer; and Tennis; examples are provided for Olympic Swimming and Olympic Weightlifting. In version 2.0, the 'sports-metadata' element is made optional; G2-compliant Documents should not use 'article' element — rather, any companion NITF articles would reside within their own 'inlineXML' component. It allows for redefining datestamps to be G2-style datestamps. V2.0 allows for redefining of attributes with controlled vocabularies to have QCode-style values (with the colon in the middle). Improvements have been to Core, Basketball, Baseball, Ice Hockey, and American football. All proposed changes are backwards-compatible additions. Documentation has been updated to support all these new attributes...

[July 2008] SportsML 2.0 Submission. The SportsML 2.0 Proposal was submitted to the IPTC for the July, 2008, meeting in Glasgow. Changes fall into these three categories: (1) G2 Compliance; (2) General-purpose additions to Core and Plugin Schemas; (3) New Rugby Plugin [example]. As to compliance, per the "SportsML 2.0: IPTC G2-Standards Compliance Guide": SportsML 2.0 complies with the IPTC G2-Standards, a framework for news metadata. This Guide explains the G2 news format with reference to sports content and standard SportsML structures. The IPTC's G2 Standard provides a unified framework for packaging and exchanging news content. It specifies a standard model for news metadata regardless of the content or media type. G2 has powerful taxonomy management, better interactivity among IPTC standards (SportsML, EventsML and NITF), and flexibility regarding level of implementation...

[April 2, 2008] SportsML 2.0. ZIP file with .PPT presentation. By Paul Kelly and Alan Karben (XML Team Solutions). Beijing. April 2, 2008. The 'sports-metadata' element is made optional; G2-compliant Documents should not use 'article' element — rather, any companion NITF articles would reside within their own 'inlineXML' component. Allow for redefining datestamps to be G2-style datestamps. Allow for redefining attributes with controlled vocabularies to have QCode-style values (with the colon in the middle). Improvements have been to: Core, Basketball, Baseball, Ice hockey, and American football. All proposed changes are backwards-compatible additions. Documentation has been updated to support all these new attributes...

[April 2008] "NewsCodes — Sports Codes." By IPTC Staff. In IPTC Mirror (April/May 2008). "An initial draft of the 'New Subject NewsCodes' was available to delegates before the Spring 2008 Meeting... Sports codes: Working Party Vice-Chair Honor Craig-Bennet (PA) told delegates that one issue that needed specific consideration was how to deal with the Sports entries. At the moment these essentially consist of a series of individual sports names, and (because efforts have been made to ensure that the list is as comprehensive as possible) these entries are a significant proportion of the total Subject NewsCodes set. It was suggested that the best approach would be to separate out the sports list as a separate taxonomy. The Sports heading would be retained in the main Subject News-Codes, along with general entries covering such areas as competition news, events, personalities, and doping. During discussions it was pointed out that the use of a separate Sports scheme would be relatively straightforward with the NewsML-G2 (and other G2-standards). The proposal to create a separate set of Sports News-Codes met with general agreement, and the precise split will be determined by the taxonomy group..."

[October 18, 2006] SportsML 1.8. "SportsML 1.8 was voted in as an official IPTC standard on October 18, 2006, in Madrid. This update is backwards compatible with SportsML, with the exception of a short number of corrections to content errors in the baseball plugin. It also contains several new constructs to the 1.7 release, including a plugin for the sport of Curling... Most changes in v1.8 are fully backwards-compatible. The only exceptions are as follows, and can be viewed as errors of sorts within the SportsML 1.7 spec. These problems were brought to our attention during discussions of SportsML with a Major League Baseball ballclub. Within the stats-baseball-offensive element, the SportsML 1.7 attribute 'defensive-interferance-reaches' is misspelled. Furthermore, this attribute would be clearer if renamed to be 'reached-base-defensive-interference', which is in the naming style of other reached-base attributes. Within the action-baseball-pitch element, the SportsML 1.7 attribute 'pitch-type' is defined as being (ball | strike | in-play). In reality, the term 'pitch type' applies to whether the pitch was a fastball, a curveball, a slider, etc. The (ball | strike | in-play) options instead are considered 'umpire calls.' Hence, SportsML 1.8 proposes that the pitch-type attribute be redefined as (fastball | curveball | etc), and a new 'umpire-call' attribute be created, which would have the values (ball | strike | in-play)...

[December 09, 2003] "IPTC Joins in XML News Standards Summit. IPTC Roadmap 2005 for NewsML, NITF and SportsML." - "XML-based formats for sharing news are rapidly gaining acceptance and may soon revolutionise the way news is shared between agencies and is presented to the public, a software developer's group was told today. But traditional newspaper publishers are still moving cautiously. 'Customers prefer extremely simple solutions,' said Geoff Haynes, manager of product development for The Associated Press. More than 100 news organisations, news system vendors and XML developers gathered here for The News Standards Summit, an all-day session where progress reports were delivered by developers and users who share XML as their lingua franca. As a major force in news standards for nearly 40 years, IPTC presented its latest versions of NewsML, NITF and SportsML -- standards that are already in use by major news agencies around the world. 'The wide interest and participation in the News Summit proves that there is an industry-wide need to develop the business cases for the required for management support and implement the existing standards for news,' said John Iobst, chairman of the IPTC. With several text-based systems for tagging news content and important data about the news, IPTC is provides a framework for moving news stories from creation through editing and onward to publishing. For magazines and web discussion 'blogs', several XML standards group presented plans for publishing and syndication. The IPTC described its own plans -- called IPTC Roadmap 2005 -- to update NewsML and revamp the method for proposing, designing and maintaining its XML standards. 'The IPTC Roadmap 2005 has as its primary goals to make standards easier to implement and to improve documentation and education on standards. This is driven by requirements from our users, and shows that IPTC is already aligning with wide user demand,' said Michael Steidl, IPTC's Managing director. 'This makes us work harder on these aims.' The News Standards Summit was held in partnership with the XML 2003 Conference of IDEAlliance and OASIS. The IPTC's next regular meeting will be in Athens in March 2004. The IPTC, based in Windsor, England, is a consortium of the world's major news agencies, news publishers and news industry vendors. It develops and maintains technical standards that are used by virtually every major news organisation in the world..." See "XML 2003 News Standards Summit Seeks Interoperability and Convergence."

[May 15, 2003] "Worldwide Sports Data Language is Launched." - "A new computer language to describe sports results has been given final approval by a worldwide consortium of news organizations. Sports Markup Language, or SportsML, is a standard created by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), an association of the world's major news agencies. Plans to integrate SportsML into mainstream news feeds were discussed at an IPTC meeting in Washington, D.C., on May 1, 2003. This followed formal ratification of the standard at the regular spring 2003 IPTC meeting in Nice, France. SportsML breaks sports data into bite-sized pieces and allows publishers to completely describe the how, what, when, where and why of sports. Documents in SportsML can be as simple or as complex as needed, drawing from a wide range of available descriptions for sports scores, schedules, standings and statistics. Team and player names, results, standings and other important information are handled in a standardized way, greatly reducing the tedious editing process that is often required to prepare sports results for publication. League data can also be stored in SportsML, making standings and playoff results easier to handle. In Washington, members decided to more tightly integrate SportsML with other IPTC standards, making it easier to install and maintain applications that use SportsML. The final version of SportsML and supporting documents is now available at no cost on the IPTC's web site. Members of the IPTC include The Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, Agence France-Presse, Deutsche Press-Agentur, Reuters, Sweden's Tidningarnas Telegrambyrå, and Pinnacor (formerly ScreamingMedia)..."

[November 11, 2002] "Worldwide Sports Data Language Is Launched." - "A new computer language to describe sports results was released to the public at the 'Sports Media & Technology' trade show sponsored by Street & Smith's Sports Business Journal. The Sports Markup Language, or SportsML, gained preliminary approval at the International Press Telecommunications Council's autumn meeting. Sports Markup Language, or SportsML, is a standard created by the International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC), an association of the world's major news agencies. SportsML breaks sports data into bite-sized pieces and allows publishers to completely describe the how, what, when, where and why of sports. Documents in SportsML can be as simple or as complex as needed, drawing from a wide range of available descriptions for sports scores, schedules, standings and statistics. Team and player names, results, standings and other important information are handled in a standardized way, greatly reducing the tedious editing process that is often required to prepare sports results for publication. League data can also be stored in SportsML, making standings and playoff results easier to handle. The IPTC approved SportsML version 1.0 draft at its October meeting in Amsterdam. Final ratification of the standard is expected at the next regular IPTC meeting in March 2003 in Nice, France. Members of the IPTC include: The Associated Press, UPI, Reuters, The New York Times, Agence France-Presse, Deutsche Press-Agentur, Reuters, Sweden's Tidningarnas Telegrambyra, and Pinnacor (formerly Screaming Media)..."

[August 21, 2001] David Allen reported in August 2001 that the IPTC (International Press Telecommunications Council) was preparing SportsML as a 'specialized content XML DTD for NewsML'. A beta version of the DTD: planned for October 2001. Detail: Posting from David Allen (International Press Telecommunications Council) to 'newsml@yahoogroups.com', August 21, 2001. "IPTC work is now well advanced on SportsML. This will be the first specialized content dtd for NewsML and it is planned to release a beta version in October. Any NewsML users who would like to get more closely involved in this activity are reminded that IPTC Associate Membership is available to developers and vendors to the news industry."